Saturday, May 24, 2008

The Best Book on the Market

Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute has a really good book out at the moment, modestly called THE BEST BOOK ON THE MARKET. The emphasis is on the last three words, as it is a book which extolls the merits of a free market. It's accessibly written and quite entertaining. The blurb says...

The free market makes the world go around. Maybe it's time we all tried to understand it a little better. Luckily Eamonn Butler is the ideal teacher to get us all up to speed. Markets are everywhere. But how many of us understand how they work, and why? What does a 'free market' really mean? Do free markets actually exist? Should we have more or less of them? Most of all - do we really need to know all this? The answer is: Yes we do. This book makes economics simple so that even politicians can understand it. If any mention of free markets sends your mind screaming back to your musty old school economics textbook, think again. "The Best Book on the Market" will keep you gripped, intrigued and well informed. Abandoning complicated mumbo-jumbo, Eamonn Butler, Director of the UK's leading free market think-tank, demystifies the world of markets, competition, monopolies and cartels, prices and overspills.Using examples from our everyday lives, Dr Butler explains how the markets we have, and the many more we need, can work to create a richer, freer and more peaceful world. This book shows readers how to stop worrying and love the free economy.

In a way it's amazing he got it published as publishers generally turn their noses up at anything which faintly reeks of being right wing, so well done to Capstone. You can buy it HERE.

7 comments:

It's funny when proponents of free markets get all up in arms when the end result doesn't satisfy their expectations. A good contemporary example would be the labour market - surely conservatives ought not to want to impose restrictions on immigration? Or what about denationalising the NHS so that we can have a competitive healthcare market?

I used to think conservatism was askin to libertarianism, but it seems not. Perhaps they used to be more similar, or perhaps the definition is somewhat in the UK and US?

Yeah, lovely, Hayekian economics is wonderful, cannot be tampered with in any way, any and all solutions involving state intervention are automatically bad, any and all solutions involving the private sector are brilliant.

Even if the end result turns out a cock up, it can't be a bad thing. Let's privatise the health service entirely and let poor people die of curable diseases. Can't be that bad if dogma is fulfilled.

This debate's been done to death. You lost; even Thatcher didn't implement the loopier ideas. The Tory Party's moved on from these sub-undergraduate drivellings - this is not unrelated to its pick up in the polls compared to the last decade or so.

Unfair, anonymous. I'm not saying the market is always perfect - on the contrary. It wouldn't work if it was perfect. Markets are human and human beings are never perfect. But politicians are human too – and whenever they try to 'perfect' the market they seem to create the opposite of what they intended.

Iain, since when were books on the basics of economics either unusual or by default 'right wing'?

Markets are neither left nor right, but a neutral tool, right wing govts the world over have used command-control effects just as left wing ones have used markets. Markets are liberal, as was Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill.

I've had this book on my "to read" list since I heard about it, it looks quite good, and will probably be better at helping me explain markets that, for example Harford's Undercover Economist, which is very pro-market and normally available in the bestseller section or special offer section of most station bookstores.

If you perpetually label markets as a "right wing" thing,t hen those of us on the left who also favour them strongly find it harder and harder to persuade people they're not evil—which is why you get corporatist idiocies such as PFI from left leaning Govts.